David Albert Talking Complete Nonsense

I am having serious trouble listening to this stream of complete crap he's talking. I have only managed an hour so far, with a few breaks.

My comment:

17:41 I can't take seriously statements like this one "The laws of Newtonian theory determine the complete physical condition of the world, given the complete physical condition of the world at some earlier time." This was an hypothetical argument made by Laplace and it's become something else entirely, solely through mindless repetition ever since. Nobody seriously believed you could learn anything about the world under this hypothesis, did they? It reduces knowledge to infinite initial information and time becomes meaningless, therefore knowledge cannot change. That's just not an interesting idea at all. No meaningful theory, complete or otherwise, can start from material and information without any understanding subject for whom that information is meaningful. Any such theory is vacuous. These vacuous theories are what David Albert calls realist: 55:25.

And a response:

@艾米心amihart 1:05:55 I think the argument I gave is the one he asks for here. You will never have a theory of "the top system" that is complete because physics is an empirical science: it is based on actual measurements made by sentient subjects who understand the contexts in which those measurements are made and who are capable of making the neccasary judgements which give those measurements physical significance. It is this empirical foundation that ultimately produces the Lagrangian/Hamiltonian dynamical descriptions of physical systems which take the form of selection principles rather than causal mechanisms. The only efficient causes in experimental physics are those arising from the agency of the individual carrying out the experiment as they act to bring about the conditions that they expect will produce the phenomena they observe. [See * below.]

But for some reason Barandes doesn't want to talk about observers. 1:24:32 I guess because the (I think bogus) "realist" premiss of the discussion prohibits it.

But he does mention measurement interactions at 1:28:27 and then the bogey-man jumps out of Albert's closet! 😂

[* Yes, even when one billiard ball collides with another: that is an experimental arrangement and it is caused by an action initiated by the person carrying out the experiment, who had first to procure a flat table and some billiard balls. There are no fundamental dynamical laws that we know of, and there never could be any that are empirically observable, just because of what empirical observation is. It is clear that David Albert doesn't take empirical principles seriously when at 1:33:26 he states that F = m a "doesn't have boundary conditions". What does he think E = ½ m v² + C is?]

1:15:16 He is lost because he doesn't distinguish between physics and metaphysics. He says that the entirety of the world is a collection of particles and that he describes a law. That is backwards. He describes the world as a collection of particles and states a law which he supposes is everything anyone needs to know about that collection of particles. In fact, he is imagining a collection of particles and some sort of myopic Laplacian daemon who tries to do what Laplace imagined it would do. In fact his description is not complete, because the collection of particles he describes are never going to be able to create conditions in which, say a Bose-Einstein condensate could appear. These conditions, like those where billiard balls undergo reversible elastic collisions, are created by conscious observers with intent who act on the world according to what they think they know about it. Laplacian daemons in hyperspace, even without myopia, cannot do that. This is why naïve realism is ludicrous. It is physicists and philosophers imagining they are like God and that their "laws" are something beyond merely the behaviour of individual animals just trying to earn a living.

1:37:06 "What I'm used to thinking I'm going to be offered by fundamental physical laws about worlds like that [I guess he means worlds consisting solely of particles with" totalities" or histories or something], is some claim like 'Here is the set of evolutions of these configurations that are physically possible, and here's the set that aren't. OK? I'm used to being offered some simple rule that distinguishes between those two." No mention of experimental conditions or observations, just inviolable Universal laws. Who offered him this? Newton? I don't think so. Einstein? Maybe. Universal physical laws do not divide the phase space of physical systems into allowed and disallowed parts, it is we who divide the phase space into parts that we observe and parts we do not. The structure of the phase space of a physical system is not a property of the system, it is a property of our description of that system and our experience of measuring its dynamics.

1:43:19 I have had enough for today. David Albert is convinced that being a realist about physics necessarily entails being an extreme reductionist 1:44:46. That is quite a common point of view, but it's not interesting and it has produced a great deal of bullshit. See Why is Physics So Difficult?

1:58:33 Day 3. There's an instance of Barandes' theory that describes an exact initial state for the putative global system, and a set of conditional distributions that follow from that which describe the dynamical evolution, but it also contains higher order structure which is not determined by the initial conditions.

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Albert Einstein was also full of the same "realist" crap. It's not realism, it's a complete metaphysical phantasy! See Why is Physics So Difficult?